“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Good Squad.

This is the way the world ends, wrote T.S. Eliot, not with a bang but with a whimper. Looking at the news this week, I feel as if I’m in a Dystopian novel.

On this holiday weekend, I devote myself to imagining a better, brighter, and more compassionate ending than an Apocalypse. Humanity is on the line, and humanity has always prevailed.

I admit it sometimes feels as if the Apocalypse is here and laughing at us. Perhaps the Archangel or one of the Greek Gods will rush to our aid and smite all the priests in the temple.

We have all any Dystopian movie could ask for, a mad and dishonest former President plotting revenge and rebellion, unimaginable heat waves scorching our most beautiful cities and countrysides, mobs with guns storming our Capitol, thugs and Christian nationalists marching against state houses with machine guns, Nazi’s linking up with congressmen and women, opportunist media moguls promoting lies and conspiracy theories for profit, our cherished democracy under its worst assault since the Civil War, the apartment houses of the wealthy falling into the sea., old people dropping dead of heat strokes, the homeless begging for their tents, drought and fire, Marilyn Taylor Greene and the conversion of social media into a global hate machine.

Hollywood doesn’t come close to touching reality.

I can’t recall a time such as this in my lifetime. This is news to survive, not consume.

and social media spawn hate and conspiracy around the clock, seven days a week.

It feels at times that honor, loyalty, and truth have given up on us and fled to other galaxies.

On July 4th, I pledge love for my country and hope for the future I worry if God isn’t keeping his promise in the Kabbalah to abandon us if we don’t care for Mother Earth.

Thomas Paine said democracy was worth fighting for, and I am no sunshine patriot.

I can’t blame God for running away from us, he might take mercy on us yet, either giving up on us and our sorry ways of stepping in to show us how to be human or leading the battle for honor and compassion.

Perhaps he’ll send us Alita the Battle Angel, or the Blade Runner.

I’m not ready to give up on the world just yet.

I think only human beings would be so blind and blinded as our planet comes apart and our government and millionaires keep on fighting for more money and bigger prophets and more cruelty and destruction and assault on Mother Earth.

Science is not dead, just battered. We are making a choice, all of us, and we will live with the consequences.

Human beings are capable of violence,c cruelty, and self-destruction.

But human beings are also capable of love, art, caring, peace, and invention. We are the only species that wants to be better and often is, that has a conscience and does good.

My choice is hope and despair, and I will never choose despair.  That would be an apocalypse of the soul.

If the forces of rage and greed are on the rise, so are the forces of love and justice.

So far, love and justice has always prevailed, so has truth and empathy.

Honestly, I don’t think we are at the end, I think we’re at the beginning of something difficult, painful, wonderful, and affirming. We are awake, our hearts and souls and mind opened and paying attention.

I have faith that something good will come of this. The philosopher Barbara Marx Hubbard said the Apocalyps can mean the unveiling of the deeper self of humanity.

That’s what I feel. All around, I see and hear and read of that deepening sense of humanity, boiling just out of sight of the news brought about by our human weaknesses and the struggle for the fate of the earth.

There is no great big apocalypse, said Neil Gaiman, just an endless procession of little ones.

My awareness of the apocalypse is not something that is coming in the future. In a sense, the apocalypse has been here for years, arriving in small portions all over the planet, and it’s only because we live in a bubble of social insulation that we think we still have the luxury of waiting for it to come.

But I don’t see the apocalypse as the end or the beginning of the end. The wrath has not descended. Hope has not flickered and died. The future is what we make of it, there is plenty of time.

If I were designing a recruiting poster for the struggle against the Apocalyse, it would simply read Hope And Promise.

In the final years of my good and long life, I’m game for this great struggle. I know I am not nearly alone.